In a city where cattle drives, railroads, and rodeos helped define its identity, The Best Hat Store remains a living piece of that history. Its hats—many bearing the family’s understated “+X” (or “positive times”) logo—appear far beyond the Stockyards, from Professional Bull Riders tours to skijoring events across the West.

Most of the hats begin their journey in Bowie, Texas, before arriving in Fort Worth. “Every hat is handmade, touched by up to 24 hands before it leaves the factory,” says Maddox as she walks me through the store. “The one on my head is 100% beaver.” Much of what’s made here starts with beaver felt, prized in traditional Western hatmaking for its density, resilience, and ability to hold a shape. Unlike straw or lower-grade wool blends, beaver felt can be reworked without collapsing its structure, which is what allows hats to be reshaped by hand rather than stamped out of a mold.

“People might consider this a dying art,” says Maddox. “Finding folks with the knowledge and patience to master every step of the process isn’t always easy.” Preserving a skill set—especially in an era when so much production happens far from view of the buyer—makes the shop one of the rare places where visitors can watch the craft of cowboy hats unfold in real time, from raw felt to finished crown. “It’s something we’re very proud of. And we love to share it with every single person that walks through these doors.”

It’s experts like Adams, who started shaping hats at 17, who are front of house every day, giving visitors a glimpse of the magic. “Getting to meet everyone is my favorite part,” he says. “You really get to know the person you’re working with by the time they leave.”

Despite being a town renowned for its textile crafts, Lagartera’s finest works are too elaborate for everyday use, hidden away in wooden chests or closets and reemerging for special occasions. Then, each June, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, the town’s traditional dresses—richly decorated, pleated, and baroque in their ornamentation—are brought back into the light. Residents assemble altars at the thresholds of their homes, adorning them with prized heirloom linens, and step into stockings, underskirts, petticoats, and blouses that have been painstakingly hand-stitched and preserved across generations.

***

I’ve come to Lagartera, a pueblo of 1,200 residents in Castilla La Mancha in central Spain to learn about its textile culture. Madrid is only a 90-minute drive away, but it feels a world apart in this vast stretch of Spain’s interior known as La España vacía, or empty Spain.

As I arrive, I take in the dramatic, snow-capped peaks of the Sierra de Gredos looming ahead, rising abruptly from the flat plains of the Tagus River basin that spans the Iberian Peninsula from central Spain to Portugal. On my way to Museo Municipal Marcial Moreno Pascual, a museum showcasing the town’s history, to meet Moreno García, I pass a row of low-slung storefronts where thread-worked linens hang in the windows.

Ortensia Moreno, wearing the traditional costume, looking out from a door before the start of the Corpus Christi procession

Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Moreno García, 60, is a lifelong labrandera and native of Lagartera, and has been stitching since she was a girl. “I learned it from my mother, and she from hers, ” Moreno García says. Today, she’s part of the movement to preserve the craft through both her personal practice and her involvement in the Asociación Amigas del Traje de Lagartera, which offers workshops. “We women from Lagartera are the bearers and guardians of this legacy,” she says. “We created this association to preserve the traditional costume and embroidery. We can’t let a legacy that’s centuries old fade away.”

For generations, women here have passed down this knowledge, gathering to stitch in the cool stone patios of their homes during the summer and moving indoors in winter to the upper rooms of their Lagarteran houses, where large windows draw in the light. Practiced year-round, this work is the central nerve of community—women come together to sew and to socialize.

Even today, many townspeople still learn the skill as children, beginning with simple stitches before advancing to more complex techniques that demand intense concentration: counting the correct stitches and carefully calibrating the thread’s tension.

In The New Business Traveler column, we take a look at how interesting people with fascinating jobs are traveling for work right now.

As an immigrant with relatives scattered across the world, “travel has always been tied to family for me,” says Shiza Shahid, the Los Angeles-based founder of non-toxic kitchenware brand, Our Place. “Visiting relatives, moving between places, [means] understanding that home could exist in more than one geography. I remember the feeling of arriving somewhere new but still finding familiarity in food, in language, in small rituals. That idea of connection across distance has stayed with me.”

Now, that passion for experiencing new cultures, places, and traditions informs much of Shahid’s business. “I travel as part of the work because so much of what we make is shaped by people and place,” she says. “Whether it’s meeting artisans, spending time with our teams around the world, or understanding how people cook and gather across cultures, being there in person changes how you build.”

Shiza Shahid during a research trip that took her to the Marrakech souks.

Tell me about a work trip that has stayed with you.

I traveled to Marrakech to spend time with our artisans in late 2024. A big part of Our Place’s mission is to celebrate our traditions loudly and proudly, and to help preserve the craft that carries them forward. This trip was centered around the development of a limited-edition tagine. We were working alongside third-generation craftsmen, in the very place where the tagine originates. There is something incredibly grounding about building a product not in isolation, but in deep collaboration with the people and places that have shaped it for generations.

How did you get there?

I flew via Paris. It is a relatively seamless journey, and I always appreciate the pause there before arriving somewhere as textured and transportive as Marrakech.

Who were your travel buddies?

I traveled with my husband and co-founder, Amir Tehrani, along with two of our product leaders, Chu Chimezie and Jia Zhu. It is rare to have that combination of partnership and craft in one place. Being there together meant we could make decisions in real time, grounded in both intuition and expertise.

Shahid with her Our Place tagine pot—a design that was born out of her trip to Marrakech.

I had checked into Racho La Puerta following an emotional trip home to Australia, where my brother had been diagnosed with brain cancer. In many ways arriving at the retreat felt like stepping into a protective bubble. But that kind of calm can only last so long before real life returns. After leaving the resort the emotional avoidance caught up with me and I struggled to transition back to reality. My therapist encouraged me to take a beat and find a new activity that wasn’t doomscrolling. And there it was. In the corner of my bedroom sat the unfinished, 12th attempt of one very misshapen glasses case.​

Lucky 13 had to be the charm. So I took it apart, scrapped the idea of making a case, and found a YouTube tutorial for a crocheted coaster. Surprising myself, I finished it. That one attempt (which in hindsight yielded a pretty mediocre coaster) led to many more coasters, a beanie, and even a baby blanket. Buried in that repetition and the constant temptation to permanently put down the crochet hook, a lightbulb went off. The glasses case was never about perfection or even completion. It was about how the act of making and creating can transport you to a calmer state and a place that feels grounded and familiar, whether you’re at a lovely spa in Baja California or in your own bedroom.

Most of the benefits of visiting a wellness resort or a spa—the treatments and the massages, that absolutely have their place—are fleeting. Yes, you feel more relaxed, but once you roll off that table, the overflowing inbox that is real life returns. But leaving a resort with a skill is different. It’s a way to return to your everyday world with a tangible tool for relaxation, with a lasting way to remind yourself to slow down and bring you back to yourself, even if only for a moment.

While craft-led trips are on the rise, the “skillcation” (as it’s dubbed) remains a relatively new concept. More and more resorts are starting to offer guests creative outlets that will outlast their stays. At Canyon Ranch and Enchantment Resort, guests can try activities from mixed-media art to jewelry making, while Miraval Resorts & Spas embed creative practices into the rhythm of the day. They offer traditional art classes as well as more niche ones like photography and candle-making.

Coming back out into the Cannes night from the ceremony, you walked straight into cigarette smoke rising from the terrace (we are in France, bien sûr), voices everywhere, people spilling down the steps. Lucas Bravo and William Abadie spotted each other in the crowd, two “Emily in Paris” co-stars grabbed each other by the shoulders amid the chaos at the Palais exit. Gustavsson was somewhere too, moving through it with a security guard fixed to her side, posted there by Cartier for the evening, given the necklace she was wearing—its value not the sort of thing you leave to chance at an event like this.

Every time I returned to my room, something new appeared: a Dyson fan, resistance bands, a carefully chosen beauty product; all gifts from the hotel to the guests. After the photographers, the crowds, the warmth of the Palais, and the smoke of the terrace, pulling the door closed behind me felt like stepping into a different country. Outside, the city blazed on. In here, nothing.

Wednesday Morning: After the (Media) Storm

By Wednesday, the hotel had settled into its festival rhythm. At Riviera, the ground-floor restaurant, Elijah Wood and Peter Jackson, collaborators on Lord of the Rings, were deep in breakfast conversation, Jackson magnificent in a Hawaiian shirt, the two of them quietly processing his Honorary Palme d’Or win from the night before. Out by the pool, a L’Oréal shoot was already underway, Bravo posed in the corridor alongside the garden, and makeup artists moved between suites with kit bags over their shoulders, the hotel operating as a full production hub as much as a place to sleep.

The sun was doing its thing over the Croisette, the same confident light that had announced the festival two days earlier now presiding over a city fully in its stride. As I made my way to the airport, the Carlton was already resetting: fresh flowers in the lobby, another round of champagne heading upstairs, a new wave of faces at the front desk. The team had barely caught their breath when the whole machine was spinning up again, as if the last 48 hours had been nothing but a warm-up. For the hotel that started it all, two weeks of this is not the exception.

That didn’t stop the nation’s weavers working with wool, though: sweaters embedded with meaningful patterns and intricate Crios belts continued to be knitted quietly inside cottages, a homegrown effort to keep the craft alive. Take aran, which is arguably the most recognizable expression of this history, and was spotlighted in the Oscar-nominated film Banshees of Inisherin by costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, who sourced striking wool designs that stole the show. These kinds of pieces continue to be crafted in the Aran Islands by the likes of the 50-year-old Inis Meáin Knitting Company, which is stocked in over 60 stores worldwide including Bergdorf Goodman in New York.

And among the windswept hills of Donegal, efforts are underway to fortify another Irish fabric for the future: Donegal Tweed. The region is home to the largest concentration of tweed and wool weavers in Ireland, and they are currently in the final stages of securing Protected Geographical Status from the EU for the natural fibre twill—just as Champagne from the Champagne region of France has. This will eventually mean that only tweed made in Donegal will be allowed to be marketed as such, helping to prevent imitations and retain jobs. It’s a shift that directly supports the makers themselves—something Stable of Ireland has long prioritized through its partnerships with producers like Eddie Doherty, Molloy and Sons, and Studio Donegal who create cloth for their tweed jackets, gilets, and coats.

For Reynolds and Duff, the work is never over, and a great sense of optimism unfolds whenever they hit the road again in search of new makers. Even more so when they encounter the next generation of weavers embracing their craft. “The wealth of creative talent in this country is incredible,” says Reynolds. “The number of people learning new skills in craft in Ireland has grown exponentially. It is very exciting to see.”

Returning to your room at The Rusty Parrot Lodge & Spa after dinner, you’ll find the usual trappings of turndown service—the lights dimmed, the duvet folded back, a piece of homemade chocolate waiting on the nightstand. But beside it sits something less expected: a cowboy poem.

Printed on a small card and left nightly for guests, the verses—sometimes written by local ranchers and poets, other times by famed Western writers who once passed through the region—might evoke wide-open ranges, stubborn self-reliance, or the mythic pull of the West.

“Storytelling has always been at the heart of the American West, and sharing a classic cowboy poem at turndown brings that heritage into the guest experience in a more personal way,” says Brandon Harrison, general manager of the property.

The Rusty Parrot, which started offering poems in 1990, isn’t alone in reimagining turndown service. Some hotels have incorporated locally inspired touches for years, but the idea has gained new traction—particularly among properties that have opened since the pandemic, when many brands began emphasizing hyperlocal experiences and partnerships with nearby makers. While the classic bedside chocolate still has its place, a select few hotels are now offering something more rooted in the destination, whether that’s local art, a small piece of regional storytelling, or a keepsake guests can tuck into their suitcase.

“Every night, we want turndown to feel like a discovery—one that helps our guests feel connected to where they are,” says Joel Lopez, who sources gifts—ranging from woven Ojo de Dios (God’s eye) to decorative calavera (skulls customarily used as Day of the Dead decorations)—for his guests as part of his role as director of housekeeping at Conrad Punta de Mita in Mexico, a property that opened in 2020. He added that he’s “always drawn to pieces that feel genuine and thoughtfully made and carry a connection to the people and traditions behind them.”

At some properties, turndown service has also become a way to put local artists’ work directly into guests’ hands, with hotels commissioning small pieces from nearby makers. At Violino d’Oro, which opened in 2023 in Venice, Italy, that approach draws on centuries of local craftsmanship. Many guests (including those in suites staying three-plus nights) receive small handmade items made using traditional Venetian glass techniques, including hand-blown Murano glass picture frames and bracelets made with prismatic Murrini glass beads.